Geoffrey Barkas

Geoffrey Barkas (born Geoffrey de Gruchy Barkas, 27 August 1896 – 3 September 1979) was an English filmmaker active between the World War I and World War II. Barkas led the British Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate in the Second World War. His largest "film set" was Operation Bertram, the army-scale deception for the battle of El Alamein in October 1942.

Early life

Barkas was born in 1896 in Richmond, Surrey where his father was a librarian, to parents from Jersey families. His father was Albert Atkin Barkas (born 1861) and his mother was Anna Julia de Gruchy (born 1863); both were from St. Helier.

In the First World War, he served in the 1915 Gallipoli campaign at Suvla Bay, and then in the later part of the Battle of the Somme in France, where he won a Military Cross. He co-directed with Michael Barringer (Blockade, Q-ships, The Infamous Lady), Anthony Asquith (Tell England), Berthold Viertel (Rhodes of Africa) and Milton Rosmer (The Great Barrier), he also edited Red Ensign directed by Michael Powell. Work became increasingly difficult to find in the economic depression of the 1930s, and after directing the critically acclaimed African exteriors for Robert Stevenson's King Solomon's Mines in 1937, She wrote an account in 1934 of the production of Barkas' film Palaver.

WWII camouflage

Learning to teach camouflage

Having found life hard in the film industry during the depression in 1937, Barkas joined Shell-Mex/BP under Jack Beddington, who guided Barkas into military camouflage. In May 1940, he was rapidly drafted into the Royal Engineers with a summary 10-day basic training course, followed by a camouflage course at the Royal Artillery camp at Larkhill, where modern concerns such as hiding from aerial and infrared photography were taught alongside traditional techniques.

He began in Northern Ireland in 1940, teaching army drivers how to camouflage their vehicles. He found that they regarded their camouflage nets as "cloak of invisibility", and in consequence would park trucks out in the open, covered by nets not "garnished" with the provided strips of canvas or hessian. His response was to print a training pamphlet, designed to be entertaining as well as instructive. It contained "an instructional poem" called The Sad Story of George Nathaniel Glover. Glover was a driver who "never, never could be made/ To Park his Lorry in The Shade" and who uses a net "Which he had thrown across the bonnet, With not a stitch of garnish on it." The result is that a bomb falls exactly on target, and when his friends come to find him "Not One Trace did they discover/ Of Driver George Nathaniel Glover". The army allowed the pamphlet to be published, and it became popular enough to spread from Northern Ireland across all British Army commands.

Barkas's next step was to run popular demonstrations of camouflage. He would assemble about 60 trucks, coaches and smaller vehicles and discuss with the non-commissioned officers how to hide these from the air. They would agree that a line of trucks could be parked by a hedge and all together draped with nets to appear as a thick belt of vegetation, or arrange a vehicle as a pitched-roof outhouse to a building. Then the commanders would arrive, and Barkas would give a speech about camouflage methods to defeat aerial reconnaissance. He would then signal the start, the unit would hide all its vehicles, and a moment later, using his film-making skill with timing, an aircraft would arrive and start observing. It rarely found more than a few of the vehicles.

The experience in northern Ireland gave Barkas the idea that every theatre of war is naturally patterned. When an army unit goes against the grain of the pattern, he reasoned, it becomes conspicuous; to hide, it has to go with the pattern. He developed a simple illustration of this point, by dropping a collar stud on a carpet. When it fell on a plain area, it was easy to see; when in a patterned area, it had to be searched for.

Director of Camouflage

At the end of 1940, Barkas and his camoufleurs were sent to Egypt, where he arrived on the Andes on New Year's Day 1941. He arranged a flight to observe the desert from the air, noting patterns that he named as "Wadi", "Polka Dot" and so on that he hoped to use for camouflage. During 1941 the structure of the camouflage unit changed and grew rapidly, at first with little official recognition and constantly shifting names. To get his fledgling unit recognised, he printed an unusually elegant booklet called "Concealment in the Field" in Cairo, the idea being to produce something clear, readable, and above all obviously different from the mass of army manuals. He was surprised to have this at once recognised as an "operational requirement" by the British Army's Middle East Command, that is, as an essential item for every army unit.

Barkas set up the Middle East Camouflage Development and Training Centre (CDTC.ME) at Helwan, Egypt in November 1941, with the zoologist Hugh B. Cott as his chief instructor. He was promoted to the new position of "Director of Camouflage", with the rank of lieutenant-colonel.

Barkas won an Oscar ("Best Live Action Short Film") in 1936 for his direction of Wings Over Everest. Wings over Everest was preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014, in partnership with the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

Filmography

Secrets of Nature, 1922 White Water Men, 1925 The Manitou Trail, 1925 With the Lumberjacks, 1925 Winter in Orlando Random Flakes, 1925 Prospectin' Around, 1925 Palaver, a Romance of Northern Nigeria, 1926 The Somme, 1927 Blockade, 1928, with Michael Barringer Q-ships, 1928, with Michael Barringer The Infamous Lady, 1928, with Michael Barringer The Third Gun, 1929 Tell England, 1931, with Anthony Asquith (The Battle of Gallipoli in USA) A Symphony of the Sea, 1933 Secrets of India: The Fair City of Udaipur, 1934 Wings Over Everest, 1934, with Ivor Montagu Red Ensign, 1934; directed by Michael Powell, edited by Barkas Rhodes of Africa, 1936, directed by Berthold Viertel; Barkas had shot the African location footage and battle scenes for the film a year prior The Great Barrier, 1937, (uncredited) with Milton Rosmer King Solomon's Mines, 1937, directed by Robert Stevenson; Barkas directed the African exteriors Rogue's March, 1953; directed by Allan Davis, but featuring 15 minutes of second unit footage shot in India by Barkas in January, February and March 1935 (prior to shooting his Rhodes of Africa footage) for an unproduced film version of Soldiers Three for Gaumont British